Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Happy High Speed New Year

It is the new year and things are starting to happen in earnest relative to our broadband speed upgrade!

Earlier this week Call Flow's new DSLAM (digital subscriber line access multiplexer) cabinet was installed on top of the concrete pad that was put in place during December. This is the cabinet that will contain the electronics that will get us on the super fast broadband that Call Flow will be offering shortly.

Once that cabinet appeared I notified BT Openreach (at their request) that it had been installed (hopefully they also had heard this from Call Flow)! The very next day Openreach began the process of connecting the copper that will be our bridge between our phone lines (in their new cabinet) and the superfast connections in the new Call Flow cabinet.

The fibre connection is proceeding as well. BT Openreach are pursuing two paths in parallel. One path would come from a fibre pickup point near the exit to Temple on the 404 down the conduit the provides us with our phone service. The downside of this path is that the conduit is crowded, though not at capacity, and the nature of the path into our valley is such that it may also have gotten silted up over time (creating a challenge for the running of our fibre). Work on this path is set to begin on the 14th of January.

Given the possible issues with the above path a second option is also being pursued. This option would take fibre from a pickup point close to the beginning of Temple Lane and trench it from there, down Temple Lane, and ultimately to the new cabinet that has just been installed. There is a meeting on the 16th to discuss this approach with the landowner.

In the meantime we will be waiting for power to be supplied to the new Call Flow cabinet. This has been ordered for mid February. We have been informed that all setup activities can still be completed by Call Flow without power to the cabinet, however, for subscribers to gain access to the cabinet the power will need to be there!

All of the above is good news for a change. In an ideal world we will not need the backup path for the fibre connection and we could have fibre to the new Call Flow cabinet in the coming days (or worst case week or two). At that point it will be up to Call Flow to get their infrastructure working. Continuing in the ideal world scenario this could mean that we might see high speed broadband available in February.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Google+ Followers

About Me

Retired technology executive (CTO and then CIO of a $4.5B business) reinventing himself as a maker. Specializing in solutions that exploit single board micro-processors crossing the physical interface between the computer and the real world. Most recently focused on 3D Printing and Design.